Broken Symmetry

Secretary Locke is Right on the Money

See his speech to PCAST on January 7, 2010 here: Download 25305935-Commerce-Secretary-Locke-s-speech-on-technology-transfer

Thanks to Dan Ballard for the pointer. I disagree with Dan about the necessity of funding. Funding basic science is one of the few legitimate roles of government -- a classic case of dealing with market failure.

Locke is asking exactly the right questions. What happened to Bell Labs? Why aren't new technologies making it out of our universities and into startup companies? As much as I respect venture capitalists and entrepreneurs today, the kinds of ideas getting funding today are not the same caliber as the kinds of ideas that were getting funding during the Sputnik era, when we were the envy of the world.

What do I think we should do? I think IP and inventors need to stick closer together. The incentive to commercialize an idea is strongest for its inventors. Sometimes, but not always, the inventors have the best information about who, what, when, where, and how the work might best be commercialized. The difference between the old Bell Labs and the university and government labs of today is in the comparative difficulty in solving what Hayek calls the "information problem" of matching inventors with entrepreneurs interested in developing work into commercializable form. What used to be done within vertically integrated firms is now coordinated by a decentralized marketplace. Government regulators need to take steps to improve liquidity, either by requiring public disclosure of licensing or assignment terms (reducing the uncertainty of valuations) or by reallocating some of the rights and obligations most likely to incur transactions costs that cannot be covered within the value of the deal.

Why would a VC want an independent inventor defense to patent infringement?

Fred Wilson writes:

But anyone who has spent a significant time in technology based businesses will understand that two groups working completely independently from each other will often solve a problem similarly. One group is not copying or ripping off the other group. They are simply coming to similar conclusions about how to get something done.

In these cases, it makes no sense to protect one group from the other. Nobody has taken anyone's "intellectual property." Both groups should own their inventions outright without having to license technology from the other.

That's not how it works today and as a result, our portfolio companies and entrepreneurs and startups all over this country are paying a very high tax on innovation.

VCs, of course, would benefit handsomely if their portfolio companies never had to pay for intellectual property. But that's not the main reason why a VC would want an independent inventor defense.

The main reason is because the more groups working on the same idea simultaneously, the better the terms for an investor. In effect, weaker intellectual property rights lead to more vigorous competition for VC dollars, and better terms for VCs.

Give you a new perspective on that old saw you hear from VCs: "Ideas are cheap; execution is everything."?

Purple our True Color?

In a meditation on competing informal and formal norms, Arnold Kling observes:

I have friends who are very left wing in terms of political opinions, but they consistently express personal values that reflect individual responsibility. They complain about people who make bad personal choices. All of the cultural signals that they send are conservative, even though they vote liberal. If the Democratic Party is having a hard time changing the rules to reflect collectivist ideology, in part that is because in our hearts very few of us are collectivists.

People publicly express ideology in order to be accepted by groups. But the need for social acceptance is only one among many competing needs of individuals, and Kling puts his finger on this here by noting how the ideology that guides quotidien decisionmaking is often quite different from the ideology expressed. And this doesn't make us hypocrites. It makes us pragmatic.

Is there a single ideology that will consistently guide us in every aspect of our lives? Note how the most promising candidates are undertheorized in many significant respects.

Asynchrony in the Frontal Cortex

Jonah Lehrer provides some interesting description of research on synchronized brain activity in -- of all things -- a review of Avatar:

The most notable of these "non-synchronous" regions is the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with logic, deliberative analysis, and self-awareness. (It carries a hefty computational burden.) Subsequent work by Malach and colleagues has found that, when we're engaged in intense "sensorimotor processing" - and nothing is more intense than staring at a massive screen with Dolby surround sound while wearing 3-D glasses - we actually inhibit these prefrontal areas.

What I want to know is how mirror neuron theory is considered by some to be discredited for lack of precise mechanism despite these kinds of studies? Who cares whether it's a single neuron or single group of neurons that permits these social effects?